For artist, all politics is focal

Chan makes statements with haunting, humorous images

''Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (After Charles Fourier and Henry Darger)'' is an animated video by Paul Chan.

CAMBRIDGE - Things go up, things go down, and things go around in the works of 35-year-old Paul Chan, one of the most feted artists of his generation. Nothing really gets brighter.

Chan's show "Three Easy Pieces" at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is, at first glance, a desultory affair in an unsympathetic setting. It consists of a moving light projection on the floor, a digitally animated video, and a documentary style travelogue from Baghdad.

Call me blinkered, but I missed two of the pieces the first time I went. I returned twice, but on no occasion was there more than one other person in attendance.

It's a shame, because Chan's work - though it may unsettle and frustrate interpretation - suggests a thoughtfulness about the relationship between art and politics that is extremely engaging, and not infrequently funny.

Chan has a website, www.nationalphilistine.com, which functions as an online venue for his artistic productions and talks. The most recent image he has posted is a borrowed engraving showing a Marquis de Sade-style orgy, with the words "HOW TO ORGANIZE A WAVE OF PROSPERITY" emblazoned across it. The horizontal strike-through - a favored motif in Chan's titles - suggests either a canceled or opposite meaning: Copulating our way to poverty, then? Why not?

Chan is a darling of the academic left, not just because he is politically engaged but because, in talks and interviews, he is fond of quoting celebrated thinkers of the left, from Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot to H??l??ne Cixous and Charles Fourier.

If this tempts you to dismiss him as a precocious undergraduate churning out predictable agitprop, my advice is, think again. Chan is an artist who is politically engaged as a citizen, but also aware that art's grasp of politics is fragile, relative to the scale and momentousness of political realities.

His major achievement to date is a series of works called "The 7 Lights" - digital animations of light and shadow projected onto walls and floors. Unfortunately, only one of the seven, "5th Light," is presented here, and in scale and placement (a dead corner of the Carpenter's concrete, foyer-like space) it is made to seem unprepossessing.

But give it your attention and it becomes entrancing. Like the other works in the series, it shows black shapes in crisp silhouette floating up or falling down through a lozenge of light. The animation loops for 14 minutes before beginning again, but not before the shapes have disappeared and the light changes from white to blue through yellow, pink, and purple.

The effect is poetically mute, as only shadows can be. The rising shapes appear random and resemble torn paper or the silhouettes of guns and bags (occasionally, they splinter). The falling shapes are humans and call to mind the terrible scenes of office workers jumping from the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

But Chan has no designs on our emotions. We do not feel him trying to direct our sympathies. Rather, we find ourselves beguiled by a sense of being at one remove, as if we were in Plato's cave looking at shadow play. Which way is up? Which way is down? What is this ambiguous dance of shapes, both haunting and harmless, endlessly looping?

Something about the elemental simplicity of the work's ingredients - light and shadow, falling and rising - gives them the aura of child's play in a frighteningly sobered-up world.

The earliest of the three works at the Carpenter is an animated video projected onto both sides of a long, horizontal screen suspended from the ceiling near the middle of the room. It's called, rather cumbersomely, "Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (After Charles Fourier and Henry Darger)," and its bright colors and crowded, improbable scenes contrast with its low-tech, cartoonlike appearance.

A narrative is being recounted here, and it leads us from a vision of Arcadia to scenes of Apocalypse, including orgies of sex and violence, and back again. The piece is crowded with art-history and political references, from Goya's "Disasters of War" to the Surrealist Hans Bellmer's mutant dolls, and perhaps even to Jake and Dinos Chapman's more recent appropriations of both.

But the recurring appearance of schoolgirls running and cartwheeling through the landscape is meant to recall Darger, the outsider artist whose fantastical drawings revolve around the so-called Vivian girls - seven sisters who assist a rebellion against a regime of child slavery.

Chan's video culminates in explicit sexual scenes, but they are mechanical and formulaic rather than shocking. The video is pervaded by the sense of an incoherent, disturbing relationship between dream and reality.

If it fails as a work of art, it's because Chan is trying to do too much: too many references, too many allusions, too many big ideas. But that doesn't mean it's without interest, and a lot of the video's themes and motifs (guns, figures that spin, objects untethered from humans) foreshadow those that crop up in later works.

The third work at the Carpenter is the result of a trip Chan took to Baghdad on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. He was part of the Iraq Peace Team, which went with the aim of preventing the invasion.

Originally intending to make a film for a broad audience that would help mobilize opinion against the war, Chan ended up making a one-hour film called "Baghdad in No Particular Order" that feels tentative and inchoate rather than edifying or imploring.

At times, it's immensely affecting, never more so than during scenes showing a man listening to an Arabic rendition of the Whitney Houston hit "I Will Always Love You" as he drives through the desert.

"I really love this song," says the driver, tears welling up in his eyes. And as the camera provides footage of the desert and close-ups of trucks carrying thousands of gallons of oil, subtitles provide lyrics like "We both know that I'm not what you need," "I hope he will treat you kind," and "But above all this, I wish you love."

The ironies feel genuinely agonizing, rather than cheap. It's all too real - the sincerity behind these kitschy, pop-induced emotions, the oil, the desert, this man and his beaten-up truck, all of it on the eve of a shattering war.

The film drifts, deliberately, but the many moments of tenderness, absurdity, and beauty more than make up for the longueurs. Best of all, Chan avoids didacticism.

Footage of a girl showing off an album filled with pictures of American pop stars is followed by scenes at a pro-Saddam Hussein rally, where women wave rifles and chant crazy slogans ("Hey thunder! Saddam is your son!")

We also see - for no particular reason, but with emotionally piercing results - a caged monkey asleep, a series of blurred and ghostly faces, a vulnerable young man singing onstage before an audience of men, and a young street vendor selling books whose pages flap in the wind.

The film ends with a quote from Cixous, which beautifully captures the spirit of the film, and of the best of Chan's work: "It is very nearly the end. It is very nearly life."

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.